The growth in on-demand applications has surged to the point where demand is forecasted to exceed growth of on-premise applications in the coming years. Through software-as-service (SaaS) and cloud-based deployments accessed over the worldwide web (Web), on-demand offerings now extend to desktop, enterprise, supply chain management/logistics, utilities and many other segments. In response to this, a wave of “Appstore” initiatives has emerged as smaller software oriented architecture (SOA) style platforms to procure service-based software from central points and communities.
Attention is also turning to large enterprises and how large enterprises can leverage SaaS and marketplaces/hubs. For example, business applications in banks and financial institutes, public sector and manufacturing and other mainstream industries contain valuable data and functionality. In turn, these applications need to integrate with external services in order to enhance the decision making quality and other aspects of business processes. Having access to a reserve of external services can drastically reduce overhead and increase efficiencies in line-of-business activities.
Services in large enterprises relate to a myriad of applications in the form of multi-vendor suite solutions, home-grown applications and third-party, business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions, all operating within complex information technology (IT) landscapes and on-premise hosts. They are typically transactional, long-running and have complex data dependencies across different applications. This makes it difficult and sometimes impossible to create decoupled services that are redeployed onto external clouds. Unlike today's SaaS offerings, opening up transactional services for wider, commoditized use through marketplaces and hubs requires that services continue to execute from their secure, hosted environments.
Third-party business-to-business (B2B) gateways and integration platforms have emerged to reduce the costs of adapting and integrating transactional, enterprise services across trading partners. Because applications of trading partners are built independently, they face a complex integration challenges when opening up to business networks.
Taken together, the growth of the on-demand model adoption, now seen through platform accelerators in “Appstores,” B2B gateways, BPO initiatives, service marketplaces and business network collaboration hubs, poses strategic uncertainties for the corporate world. Questions remain as to how customers best procure their services beyond organizational boundaries and also exploit services from the external environment, and how can such a strategy scale for all partners in business networks so that it fosters operational transformation on the business network. Correspondingly, software vendors are faced with the challenge of creating a comprehensive platform strategy for not only allowing their applications across different product segments and technology stacks to be accessed, as services, but also to support service access and delivery needs of partners in a business network.